Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.5.22 (a374c3a)
• imsg: 0.9.0 (also reproduced on 0.8.2)
• macOS: Tahoe (26), M4 MacBook Air, 24GB RAM
• iMessage channel: cliPath /opt/homebrew/bin/imsg

Problem

After upgrading to 5.22, the gateway cannot connect to the imsg RPC watch.subscribe endpoint. Every startup attempt fails:

imessage: watch.subscribe startup failed (attempt 1/3): Error: imsg rpc timeout (watch.subscribe)
[default] channel exited without an error
[default] auto-restart attempt 1/10 in 5s

The iMessage channel never initializes. No incoming messages are received. Outbound works via openclaw message send.

Key finding

imsg rpc works perfectly from the command line:

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"watch.subscribe","params":{},"id":1}' | imsg rpc
{"id":1,"result":{"subscription":1},"jsonrpc":"2.0"}

chats.list also works manually but times out from the gateway:

imsg rpc not ready after 13281ms (Error: imsg rpc timeout (chats.list))

What we tried

• Rebooted Mac entirely
• Upgraded imsg from 0.8.2 to 0.9.0
• Changed cliPath to libexec binary directly
• Killed all imsg processes before restart
• pkill + gateway restart multiple times
• openclaw doctor --fix (clean)
• Set OPENCLAW_DISABLE_BONJOUR=1 (per issue Bonjour advertiser failure cascades into iMessage channel teardown #65393)
• Verified Full Disk Access for imsg

Possibly related

• GitHub issue Bonjour advertiser failure cascades into iMessage channel teardown #65393 (Bonjour advertiser failure cascades into iMessage teardown)
• Was working on 5.22 for several hours before breaking
• Gateway was restarted ~8 times during debugging session which may have contributed

Impact

iMessage is the primary channel for this fleet (14 agents). Complete loss of inbound messaging.